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The Millionaire's Daughter
Sophie Weston
“Admit it. You deliberately set out to get under my skin tonight, didn’t you?”
Kosta trailed one finger down the line of sensitivity at the back of her neck. Annis shivered. “Didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
His arms went around her, hard.
“Why?” he murmured against her lips.
“I—don’t know.” And she didn’t.
“Yes, you do.” His hands were molding her body. “Chemistry. You’re getting the hang of it at last.”
Dear Reader,
When I was twelve I made friends one holiday with a millionaire’s daughter. She wasn’t spoiled. She was lonely. Loneliest, perhaps, at home.
I thought I’d forgotten her. Yet when I started to write this story, I found Annis kept reminding me. Annis, though, was lucky. Her father remarried and suddenly she had a little sister!
Two women could not be less alike. Annis is clever and quiet. Bella is bubbly and beautiful. Still, they laugh together, love each other and protect each other’s back. More than friends, allies.
To such an extent, in fact, that I found Annis would not let me go until I had told Bella’s story, too. It disconcerted all of us, including my editor. (Completely threw her schedule.) The Bridesmaid’s Secret, coming next month, is the result.
I hope you enjoy these books as I much as I enjoyed writing them.
Best wishes,
Sophie Weston
Readers can visit Sophie Weston’s Web site at http://www.sophie-weston.com.
The Millionaire’s Daughter
Sophie Weston
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE (#u69939e6c-61fe-5387-aee4-3b7dcb87f8cc)
CHAPTER TWO (#u358f9aea-65d9-5986-bc6e-3cd21b555e0c)
CHAPTER THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
ANNIS CAREW walked into her father’s house and stopped dead. This was not the small, family supper she had been expecting. This was a full scale dinner party with women in jewels, waiters in black tie and, inevitably, tonight’s candidate to help the millionaire’s plain daughter off the shelf.
And what a candidate! Annis picked him out the moment the door closed behind her. He was talking to her father on the other side of the drawing room but they both glanced up to see who had arrived. At once, Annis forgot her father, her kind matchmaking stepmother Lynda, and everyone else in the room.
The candidate was tall and good looking in a sardonic, hard edged sort of way. But it wasn’t his height or his Byronic profile that stopped her breath in her throat. It was what she privately called The Look—the look of a man who did not have to try.
Annis knew The Look from grim experience. She had been meeting—and failing to make any impression on—men with The Look ever since the first smart cocktail party at which Lynda had tried to introduce her to what she called Nice People.
Oh, no, not that one, thought Annis. Lynda, what are you trying to do to me?
Her father had obviously been waiting for her. Lynda’s instructions, no doubt. Now, as he said something to the tall dark man, he looked relieved.
Probably thought I’d realise what was going on and cut loose, thought Annis. As I should have done. How could I be so stupid?
On the telephone this afternoon Lynda had been casual. Too casual, Annis now realised. ‘Come over for supper, darling. It’s so long since we’ve seen you,’ Lynda had said.
And Annis, speeding through her flat on the way to her next meeting, had flung, ‘OK. What time?’ at the telephone speaker without pausing to think.
So now here she was, high and dry, an ugly duckling in her sober business suit among the swans of London’s elite. Rain-draggled hair dripped down her back. Meanwhile The Look shouldered his way purposefully through the crowd to the rescue of the millionaire’s plain daughter who didn’t want rescuing.
Say a big hello to the perfect Friday night, thought Annis. She felt a strong urge to scream. She repressed it. Just.
Annis watched the tall figure bearing down on her. Like most of the men here this evening he was formally dressed. Unlike most of them he was wearing a high collared Nehru jacket in a muted brocade that glimmered richly in the candlelight. It skimmed his slim hips in a fashion that was as flattering as it was startling. Together with his strange, slanted eyes, it gave him an air of slightly exotic danger.
No doubt at all, thought Annis, that the effect was deliberate—and carefully calculated. A peacock, she thought, among all these high priced swans. Who on earth was he?
He reached her and took her hand.
‘Across a crowded room—I knew it would happen one day.’ He had a voice like black treacle, warm and deep and horribly sensuous. You could, thought Annis indignantly, probably drown in that voice. Slowly and pleasurably.
She gave him a wintry smile and removed her hand.
‘Hi, doll,’ said her father, arriving.
Since Annis had become a businesswoman in her own right her father treated her with a breezy camaraderie that imperfectly disguised his gratitude that she no longer admitted to emotions.
‘Hi, Dad,’ she said, cool as the glass of champagne a waiter was pressing into her hand.
‘This is Konstantin Vitale. He specially wants to meet you.’
I’ll just bet he does, thought Annis dourly. She wondered briefly whether it was the opportunity for business offered by her father’s company or her own status as an heiress that had drawn Konstantin Vitale across the room to her side.
Tony Carew answered the question for her. ‘He’s working on the headquarters project.’
‘Ah. Palazzo Carew,’ said Annis, understanding.
Her father’s plans for the new centre he was going to build for his company were enthusiastically extravagant. They had impressed the media and had stunned his rivals. His family had been teasing him about them for months.
‘So, here’s your mystery woman, Vitale.’ He sounded pleased with himself ‘My daughter, Annis.’
‘Mystery woman?’ echoed Annis. She was growing warier by the minute.
The Byronic hero answered before her father had the chance. ‘So late. So damp. So preoccupied.’
To her annoyance, an instinctive hand flew to the soaked strands at the base of her neck. His eyes followed the gesture. She felt embarrassment heat her skin.
She said more sharply than she intended, ‘Nothing mysterious about being late. I let time get away from me, that’s all.’
‘You two should have a lot in common,’ Tony announced.
He gave Annis a conspiratorial grin before he pushed off. She knew that grin. It meant things were going to plan. In this case, she was almost certain the plan in question had been laid down in advance of the party by his wife. She ground her teeth silently.
‘You don’t look as if you agree with him,’ said the black treacle voice, amused. But not only amused. The damned man sounded as if he was caressing her.
Annis felt her spine arch like an angry cat’s. Over his shoulder she could see her reflection in the oval Venetian mirror. It was eighteenth century, one of Lynda’s finds. Curlicued and garlanded, gleaming with gold, it might have been made for Konstantin Vitale, with his brocade coat and dramatic profile.
It had certainly never been intended to reflect someone like Annis. Her short dark hair had been turned black by the rain and was now plastered to her head like a skullcap. The only good thing about it was that the wet hair was also plastered over the ugly scar that ran from her eyebrow to her hairline. Realising it, she scowled horribly, then saw that he was laughing at her again.
Hurriedly Annis readjusted her expression.
‘I always try to keep an open mind,’ she said lightly.
He hardly pretended to believe her.
‘Sure you do.’
Her reflected brows snapped together in a frown of irritation. Annis saw it in despair. Her frowns were notorious. There never seemed to be anything that she could do about them, either.
She struggled to forget that she was over-tired, underdressed and that her minimal make-up had run in the rain. And that the Lord Byron look-alike in front of her had noticed every detail. She even tried to hide how thoroughly jangled she was to find the promised family supper transformed into one of Lynda’s find-Annis-a-man fests. After all, none of that was Konstantin Vitale’s fault, she reminded herself.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Put it down to end-of-the-week neurosis.’ She squared her shoulders, pinned on a polite smile, and tried to retune her mind to social conversation. ‘So what does my father think we have in common?’
The sardonic expression was very evident. ‘To be honest it was Mrs Carew who said you and I ought to get together.’
‘Surprise me,’ muttered Annis.
‘Excuse me?’
She shook her head, annoyed with herself. ‘Nothing.’
His eyes were speculative. ‘She respects you a lot.’
But not enough to accept that I can live without a man. There was a pregnant pause while Annis closed her lips over that one.
‘No, really. She’s a real fan. She was telling me how smart you are. What a great stepdaughter.’ It was almost a question.
Annis knew she was not reacting like a great stepdaughter. ‘That was kind of her,’ she managed in a stifled voice.
‘And unusual.’
Quite suddenly Annis realised she had run out of the ability to pretend. It was something to do with Friday-night tiredness. But more, much more, to do with that seductive voice and the horrible feeling that she was being sucked into something she could not control.
‘No,’ she said on an explosive little sigh. ‘No, it’s not unusual. Lynda does a terrific marketing campaign.’
‘What?’
She fixed the tall dark stranger with a baleful eye. She had been in this situation before. Experience told her there was only one thing she had never tried. Take a firm line straight from the start and hang on to it.
She took a deep breath and did just that. ‘Look, I don’t know what Lynda has told you. But let me set the record straight.’
He looked politely intrigued.
Annis drew a deep breath. ‘I’m twenty-nine years old, I live for my work and I don’t date.’
The man had high cheekbones and strange, slanting green eyes. They did not blink. Not blinking, he said a lot.
Ouch, Annis thought. I don’t think I meant it to sound like that.
She added hastily, ‘Nothing personal.’
It was not, perhaps, brilliantly tactful. The green eyes narrowed almost to slits.
‘That’s a relief,’ he said with a dryness that made her wince.
The deep voice had just a hint of a foreign accent. A very sexy accent. And he was taller than she was. Annis did not usually have to look up to people. It threw her off balance in every way.
‘I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. I mean I just like to make things clear. In general.’ She was floundering. Come on, Annis, you can do better than this. ‘Sometimes Lynda can be a bit misleading…’
He did not say anything, maintaining his air of gentle interest. Annis ran out of excusing generalities.
She tried the truth. ‘I—er—I mean I’m a bit of a workaholic.’
She made a despairing gesture. Too big a gesture, as always in this room of objets d’art. Champagne fountained from the glass she’d forgotten she was holding. At the same time a gold-painted plinth swayed at the impact. Konstantin Vitale steadied it. She saw he was looking deeply amused.
